I almost inadvertently had my way with a snowblower which is not as romantic as it sounds

As I type this, it’s a balmy 30° and the snow has melted sufficiently so that I can see pavement and partial grass. Actually, I can see these two surfaces quite easily as I happen to be staring down directly at them whenever I venture outside, courtesy of a hunchback brought on by the few thousand muscle spasms I acquired while shoveling out a poop patch for Oliver this past Sunday. I knew one day his bowels would be the death of me. Or, at the very least, the permanent maiming of me.

My hunchback made me take a muscle relaxant before I wrote this. If this post makes no sense and runs crooked off your screen midway, it’s because she’s a bossy, bitchy shrew and I wish she’d get the hell off my back already.

Now let’s talk about last Friday, shall we? The precursor to my transformation into Quasimodo with boobs.

Remember when Mother Nature got horny and paid Old Man Winter a booty call and they left their bastard spawn all over our driveway?

They got busy again last Friday and apparently, safe sex is not at the top of their agenda.

Stupid, prolific, nymphomaniac geezers.

There was easily two feet of snow covering our driveway last Friday. Not just any snow. Extraordinarily heavy, “heart attack” snow. For those of you who never heard of heart attack snow because you’re reading this while wearing sunglasses, shorts and tank tops, I HOPE YOU ARE BLINDED BY YOUR OWN SWEAT AND TRIP ON YOUR FLIP FLOPS AND BLEED OUT IN YOUR POOL. I shouted that last part so you could hear me above the humming of your central air. You’re welcome.

For the rest of us, heart attack snow is snow that contains so much moisture that it’s heavy enough so as to potentially give you a heart attack whilst shoveling it. You’d never know it just by looking at it though, because it’s deceptively pretty. All sparkly and glistening. Kind of like the flashy guy you brought back to your dorm room who sort of looked like a slim and trim Adam Lambert in the bar the night before but wound up looking exactly like an obese, Lady-GaGa-drag-queen wannabe the morning after, right around the time you flushed your beer goggles down the toilet along with a gallon of your own vomit.

Not that I would know, since I went to college twenty-five years ago. Now, if we’re talking George Michael and Freddie Mercury?

I still wouldn’t know. My point? DO AS I SAY, NOT AS I DO. Got that, Zoe?

Nate wasn’t due home until late that Friday which left Zoe, Helena and me snowbound. In our house. Trapped. Together. Friday happened to be the seventh day of February break from school which meant we had already spent the previous six days within close proximity of each other. Together. In our house. The same house that, thanks to the weather and an overabundance of estrogen and the impeccable timing of menses, had seemingly shrunk to the size of a linen closet.

By 11 a.m., I pretty much knew how the survivors of the 1972 crash of Flight 571 in the Andes mountains felt except that the girls and I didn’t play rugby and we had better fashion sense and three new Top Chef episodes on DirectTV and we did not cannibalize one another even though I had a ton of cream cheese in the fridge which makes everything, presumably even human flesh, taste better. Don’t you think? But nevertheless, we refrained. Unless you count Zoe and Helena biting each other’s faces off and me chewing their asses out every so often which doesn’t really count since no cream cheese was involved so nevermind.

After the eleventeenth round of How Many Nerves Can We Stand On Before Mom Chokes Us to Death With Our Own Intestines, I decided to take matters in my own hands and go all I AM WOMAN, HEAR ME ROAR on the snow to secure our freedom on my own.

I did this by calling Nate and demanding that he come home immediately and snow blow the driveway. He said no. I insisted, declaring that we were merely one or two more rounds of SHUT UP! NO, YOU SHUT! I’M TELLING MOM! GO HEAD, BABY! I’M NOT A BABY! NO, YOU’RE A BRAT! away from an incident and how was the coroner supposed to get up our driveway?

He declined, saying something about his job and paying the mortgage and putting food on the table, blah blah freaking blah. I told him that the snow was too heavy to shovel and I was *this* close to using the snow blower all by myself and unlike last time, he wasn’t there to spray paint blue grid lines on the driveway and give me coordinates and follow me around with a protractor so he had better have his EpiPen handy because hello? ASYMMETRY WAS IMMINENT.

He told me he was late for a meeting, to be careful and most importantly, don’t pound the auger because it would likely break the whole snowblower. And then he hung up before I could ask him if pounding the auger was code for masturbation and why in the world would I engage in that? All by myself? And how in the world would it break a snowblower?

Just to be safe, I took Zoe out to the garage with me so that I wouldn’t be alone and vulnerable to any spontaneous and involuntary pounding of an auger and then we both stared at the snowblower, trying to figure out how to use it and at one point, I got all excited because we found a lever with silhouettes of a bunny and a turtle on either side of it and I was all Oh my God, we have Aesop’s snowblower. It was probably only a minute or so later when I accidentally discovered that pounding the auger was not, in fact, code for self-gratification but rather, an apt description for exactly what I did between the phrases “Hey! What happens when I touch this thing?” and “Shit Shit Shit on a Stick,” the latter of which was accompanied by a nut, bolt and coil springing loose and thus, the breaking of the whole snowblower. Then I remembered what Nate had said about masturbation pounding the auger and had one of those light bulb moments that Oprah is always blabbing on about and honestly? They’re overrated.

By the way, I didn’t so much pound on the auger as I did barely touch it so in my defense, it’s Nate’s fault.

Zoe and I wound up shoveling half the driveway and I was probably two shovel-fulls away from a massive coronary before my neighbor came home and offered to snow blow the remainder for us and Zoe was all Oh my God, thank you!

But I was all Don’t throw fish at me!

And my neighbor was all Uh, what?

And I was all You know! That whole “I’m too dumb to go fishing so if you buy me dinner, I’ll stay stupid forever but if you teach me how to catch gross, slimy creatures that swim in their own poop, we won’t have to cannibalize each other with cream cheese” thing.

And Zoe was all CHINESE PROVERBS SUCK, MOM.

So I told her to get her ass inside because using such profane language in front of Aesop’s dead snowblower was tantamount to goddamn blasphemy and seeing as how I was already halfway up shit’s creek already with that whole masturbation auger pounding mistaken identity thing, I didn’t have a lot of wiggle room here and for shit’s sake, what the hell would Jesus say, blasphemer?

My neighbor was nice enough to teach me how to use his snowblower which kind of looked like a tiny red Mazda Miata with an enormous penis perched on its roof and kudos to him for doing so because I’ll be the first to admit that I’d have thought twice about teaching someone who was obviously having a psychotic break and who was babbling on and on about mistaken masturbation and cannibalizing dairy products, how to operate a piece of machinery that looked like a ginormous turbine sex toy with rotating fangs on its crotch.

It took me thirty minutes to snow blow our driveway and sidewalk and then the girls and I were free to go wherever we chose and I chose to go directly to the couch because my entire upper body was tingling and felt like it had been zapped by a taser programmed to the STUN A RUNAWAY BUFFALO mode.

Today, the snow is almost gone. And yet here my body sits, still looking like a wobbly question mark.

There’s a moral in here somewhere, probably about patience but I bet you could stick other lessons in there and it would still make sense, like practicing safe geriatric sex and not having your way with machinery from 600 B.C., and finding new uses for cream cheese and not blogging while under the influence of a muscle relaxant.

Somebody tell Aesop to boot up his laptop.

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